On Donald's drive to destroy the production of knowledge

In a statement calling for the defunding of NPR and PBS, the White House complained about a story correctly describing banana slugs as hermaphrodites, describing it as 'woke propaganda.'

For normal Americans, among the minority paying attention, the impulse is repeatedly to ask WHY? Why do Donald Trump, his MAGAs, and his various enablers among Christian nationalists and techno-utopians, want to tear down contemporary American life and civilization? What do they want?

Assuredly there are many answers: racism, sexism, gender rigidity, greed, vengeance, bruised egos, injured ignorance -- all combined in a toxic stew. 

But a common element is a war against science, against knowledge, against the human quest to accumulate scraps of truth. Adam Server describes where the Magats are trying to take us under the title, The New Dark Age. There's wisdom here; a few highlights:

... destroying American universities will also limit the growth of a Democratic-trending constituency—fewer educated voters will translate to fewer Democrats in office. The tech barons supporting Trump have companies that rely on educated workers, but they want submissive toilers, not active citizens who might conceive of their interests as being different from those of their bosses.

A formal education does not immunize anyone against adopting false beliefs, but two things are true: Many of Trump’s supporters have come to see knowledge-producing institutions and the people who work for them as sources of liberal indoctrination that must be brought to heel or destroyed, and they do not want Americans trusting any sources of authority that are not Trump-aligned. ...

Possible sources of alternative information and different visions of possibility must be stamped out.

... Trump’s attack on knowledge will harm not just the so-called [liberal] elites he and his allies are punishing. The long-term price of solidifying their power in this way will be high—perhaps even higher than Trumpism’s wealthy benefactors expect. One obvious cost is the damage to technological, scientific, and social advancement. Another will be the impossibility of self-governance, because a public denied access to empirical reality cannot engage in self-determination as the Founders imagined.

... By destroying knowledge, including the very scholarship that would study the effects of the administration’s policies on society, the Trump administration and its allies can ensure that their looting of the federal government and public goods can never be fully rectified or punished.

A Magat ascendancy threatens to engulf us in profitable hucksterism, the right spot for an RFK Jr.

For Trump and his allies, this large-scale destruction of the knowledge-production process could be quite lucrative in the short term. Some examples of this, such as Musk using his influence to secure himself federal contracts and the administration removing regulations on pollution on behalf of Trump’s oil-industry allies, are obvious. But fewer restraints on business means more corporations getting away with scamming and exploiting their customers, and more money for unscrupulous hucksters like those surrounding the president.

The disappearance of high-quality empirical evidence means not only fewer rebuttals of right-wing dogmas, but also a bigger market for wellness pseudoscience and other scams—such as Kennedy’s imbecilic suggestion to treat the growing measles outbreak in the Southwest with cod-liver oil. America under Trump is rejecting one of the most effective health-care infrastructures in human history and embracing woo-woo nonsense on par with medieval doctors measuring the four humors.

Server's conclusions are dire.

The book burnings of the past had physical limitations; after all, only the books themselves could be destroyed. 

The Trumpist attack on knowledge, by contrast, threatens not just accumulated knowledge, but also the ability to collect such knowledge in the future. Any pursuit of forbidden ideas, after all, might foster political opposition. Better for Americans to be as gullible and easily manipulated as the people who buy brain pills from right-wing podcasts, use ivermectin to treat COVID, or believe that vaccines are “weapons of mass destruction.” 

This purge will dramatically impair the ability to solve problems, prevent disease, design policy, inform the public, and make technological advancements. 

Like the catastrophic loss of knowledge in Western Europe that followed the fall of Rome, it is a self-inflicted calamity. All that matters to Trumpists is that they can reign unchallenged over the ruins.

My summary cannot do this article justice. Read it all (gift).